St Bees Weather Station - About and Credits

St Bees Weather Station

A regular request from prospective visitors, particularly overseas ones, is "What's the weather like in May/June/September/ ... ". Well, hopefully this will eventually tell you exactly what our weather is like. Various options can be selected from the above links.

A weather station was originally setup in association with the St Bees Village Primary School, funded in part by the generosity of some village businesses & by Neighbourhood Forum. The children and villagers and visitors alike have access to the data via the St Bees web site. Nowadays, the weather station belongs to the Parish Council and thereby the village.

To help fund maintenance of the weather station, past data is available for a small charge - £2 a month or £100 for all currently available data. The humidity sensor currently does not work and a replacement would cost around £150, hence our charge for data! Alltough the weather station is a high quality one, the data is not up to professional meteorological standards and any use made of the data must take this into account.

The solar radiation data is shown on the tables as a rather meaningless number. Obviously the higher the number the brighter the day. I need to work out a rough conversion - i.e. a range of figures to equate to dull, fair, sunny, etc. Work in progress!

The weather station was setup in 2006, but we can't add retrospective data to the program, although coarse manually collected data is available going back to around the 1970s. This was data collected by the late Norman Parkinson.

There are a few gaps due to the occasional unservicability. The data is updated at various intervals - fast changing data (wind speed/direction) every 5 minutes, slower changing data every 30 minutes. Historic data is updated twice a day.

Credits for Weather Station

and a number of private contributors for their help with funding the
weather recording equipment used to produce the data shown here.

We are also particularly grateful to Donna Crozier, Low Level Waste Repository Ltd, Pelham House, for her efforts on our behalf which led to LLWR funding our purchase of a new set of sensors for the weather station, some of which were begining to fail.

We are very grateful for this generous donation which has ensured the station will continue to function and provide weather data for the community and our visitors.

We are also grateful to the (now no longer operating) St Bees Maize Maze for purchasing the Solar Radiation Monitor.